mirrors into men's souls

When the protestant Elizabeth I attempted to resolve religious disagreement in her kingdom she promised the catholics that she will not make mirrors into men's souls, meaning that as long as they went through the motions of attending the Church of England to assure their allegiance to her, and lived quietly, she would turn a blind eye to what they did in private and leave them alone.

Bearing in mind the preceding bloody rule of his sister, Mary I, her resolution was intelligent and benign.

Most catholics did what was reasonably required and prospered -- some being bribed with knighthoods -- but a few leading catholic families rebelled against her rule and her situation was made more threatening by the Pope publicly dispensing English catholics from allegiance to her, thereby sanctioning her assassination and causing her to take a less benign alternative.

Read the full story Let's Thank Henry VIII and Elizabeth I

how the west became christian, not jewish

Accepted by all religions is the fact that the first humans created had no religion, and as such any godly plans for humanity were meant for a unified family, not just limited to a chosen few.

Abraham's revolutionary notion of monotheism, a belief in one God, meant that God was not just a God of the Israelites but of all people. God revealed to Abrahamthat his people were to be messengers chosen to bring universal moral instructions to all humanity, not just the Jews.

The Torah was the revelation and the Mitzvot are the divine commandments defining a godly life, and God chose the landless and powerless Jewsas messengers because humans would be free to accept or reject the message on its merits. It was a message delivered without political and economic coercion.

In return for fulfilling their divine mission, God would make the Jews a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

However, most Talmudic Rabbis do not interpret 'a kingdom of priests' as having universal implications. They believe that the covenant given by God not only provided the core religious content of the message the Jewish people were to convey to humanity but also a separate and distinctcontent designed to force Jews to maintain a separate culture. Being chosen to convey the message implied, to them, a superior position.

By superiority, the Talmudic Rabbis meant that Jews as a separate people were to be a 'light' unto the other nations. In offering the message, they cannot mandate its acceptance. Those who accepted the message choose to become chosen.

The Talmudic Rabbis saw the Jewish mission to convey the message of God, not to convert everyone to Judaism. They did not call for the annihiliation of gentile or non-Jewish religions. They saw salvation as dependent on moral behavior not on accepting Judaism, and accepted that the righteous of all faiths have an equal chance to be saved.

In this sense, the Talmudic Rabbis maintained a separate 'superiority'. They were into delivering the message to all but most certaininly do not believe in wholescale conversions.

However, in the early days of Judaism missionary activity was necessary for the growth of this revolutionary notion of monotheism to take place. In his journey from Haran to Canaan Abraham made many converts. In Deuteronomy 32:10, Abraham is described as so successful a missionary that God became known as King of the earth as well as King of heaven.

However, the word 'convert' is used loosely when referring to Abraham's missionary zeal. The formal notion of religious conversion did not emerge until much later in history. Abraham invited non-Israelites to join the Israelites, as did Isaac and Jacob.

By the time of Moses, the Torah was being expounded in seventy languages, andit provides numerous injunctions to the Jewish people to welcome strangers. It is believed, too, that God exiled Jews from their homeland for only one reason, to increase the number of converts!

Conversions came about through synagogues inviting guests and visitors -- there were thousands of houses of instruction in all towns serving as learning centers for gentiles; Jews were exhorted to personally approach potential converts; gentiles living among Jewish people were invited to assimilate; abandoned gentile children were adopted; and many gentiles converted to Judaism through marriage with a Jew.

The Jewish mission of conversion was also codifed in laws. It is not clear when these legal rules developed, but they most certainly existed after the destruction of the Second Temple when there was a need for clear religious rules to maintain the Jewish identity. So, from 400- 500 AD the existence of these laws indicates that converts were allowed, welcomed and had specific rites to undergo in their conversion.

As expected, conversions were increased during important periods of Jewish history. The Jews grew from 150,000 in 586 BC to more than eight million by the first century of the common era and, in the case of the conversion of the Idumaeans and the Ituraeans, force was uncharacteriscally used.

So widespread was Jewish missionary activty that Greek, Roman, and Christian authors wrote disparagingly about it. In Rome, for example, Tacitus, a rhetorical historian, Cicero, a lawyer, and Juvenal, a satirist, are bitter and serious about denouncing Jewish proselytizing activities, and Horace makes fun of them.

The most famous Christian comment came from Matthew 23:15 in which competition for converts became nasty: "Alas for you scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over sea and land to make a single proselyte and anyone who becomes one you make twice as fit for hell as you are."

By the onset of the Christian era, 10% of the Roman Empire was Jewish and had the Romans and Jews not fought -- the Romans destroying the Temple in 70 AD, crushing the Bar Kochba rebellion in 135 AD and ultimately expelling the Jews from Jerusalem -- the Jews would have succeeded in winning more converts than the Christians and historywould have followed a different path.

While Jewish conversion efforts continued, the stateless and powerless Jews were restricted by Roman, and later Christian and Muslim laws regarding proselytism. In 131 AD, Hadrian prohibited circumcision and public instruction in the Jewish religion. In 198 and 199 the Emperor Severus passed laws forbiddinggentiles from embracing Judaism, and in 335 Constantine re-enacted Hadrian's law, forbidding Jews to circumcise non-Jewish slaves.

Cumulatively, these restrictions not only reversed the general Jewish attitude toward welcoming converts but also produced deep psychological change in the Jewish psyche. By the time of Constantine, many Jews would have embraced Christianity and those that remained faithful to Judaism became insular and messiahanic -- waiting for a messiahto raise them from a miserable existence made more miserable by the triumphant Christians accusing the Jews of Deicide -- killing Jesus -- and setting them up for mockery and persecution.

Christians took over the Jewish mission to welcome converts and transformed its meaning. Salvation was no longer dependent on moral behavior but on accepting Christ.The faiths of others were belittled, eternal rewards were promised for converting andeternal damnation was threated for refusing to convert. Bribery, threats, and ultimately violence and murder were used to expand the Christian faith. However, Christians did make it easier for pagans to convert by relaxing the Jewish need for male circumcision and the obligation to obey Jewish law.

Persecution and fear led, over time, to the transformation of the Jewish understanding of its mission. Spreading God's word came to be seen as against Jewish law.

(This article first appeared as god's chosen people, the jews and is reprinted with permission.)

The Irish Catholic vs. Protestant Divide

The Irish troubles go back hundreds of years, and whatever spin others want to apply to the ‘troubles’ the basic antagonism, according to Regan, is the catholic vs protestant divide.

“The partitioning of the Emerald Island into a protestant North and a catholic South was applying a band-aid, not a solution,” says Regan, “because there are just as many Catholics in the North as there are protestants in the South – but it is the raving Catholics in the North who refuse to live in peace.”

"A great many Northern Irish – peace loving Catholics and Protestants - left for England after 1969 when the British Army moved in,” says Regan, “and we left in 1992.”

“For 38 years until July 31 2007 the British Army’s occupation of Northern Ireland was its longest continuous military campaign in its history,” says Regan, “and I fail to see what it has done, other than delay the inevitable reunion of the Emerald Isle.”

"Apart from satisfying the blood lust of some raving Protestants who would rather die or cause innocent people to die than suffer under majority Catholic rule, the 38-year British army presence in Northern Ireland was a total waste of resources and money and lives."

"If we have 9/11 to thank for anything," says Regan, "it's bringing perspective and sense to the raving lunatics of both religions in Northern Ireland, and particularly the financial backers of the Catholics in the USA."

why is judaism less popular than christianity and islam?

Unlike Christianity and Islam, Judaism never developed into a proselytizing religion. Formed from the 12 tribes of Israel, Judaism is a 'family' religion. It does not urge its 'family' members to reach out to the far corners of the Earth and convert non-believers to its creed, and indeed even the early followers of Christ were only interested in converting Jews.

Jesus believed he was the son of God and the rightful heir to the Kingdom of Judah - for which he was sentenced to death by crucifixion by his own people - but even his own family did not believe in him, thinking him crazy, during his lifetime. It was only after his death that his family, seeing a multitude of people mourning him, that his family - particularly his brother James - took up his cause, appealing to the tribes of Israel to acknowledge Jesus as their Messiah.

For this, James, too, was sentenced to death. He was stoned to death by the Jewish Sanhedrin in c 60AD - making Jews less likely than ever to accept Jesus as their Messiah. Faced with this fact, the early Christians eventually decided, with much heartache, to break with the Jews and win, instead, the hearts and the minds of the pagans that they had previously despised as being 'unclean'.

If Christianity and Islam are more popular today than Judaism then it has a lot to do with the aggressive way both of these religions developed into organizations bent upon mass conversion of non-believers, but there is another 'popular' force within these religions that differs markedly from Judaism and makes conversions palatable.

Basically, both Christianity and Islam promise a 'paradise' after death that Judaism has no need to dwell upon. To be the Chosen People of God is 'enough' for the Jews. Their religion does not need a 'carrot' in the form of: behave well in this life and you will be rewarded in heaven (with young virgins, or whatever).

Judaism is a 'here and now' religion. God takes care of His Chosen People - the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Isreal) - by ensuring their prosperity on Earth, and the Jews take care of God by following the Covenants. When awful calamities befall the Jews - and there have been many calamities throughout history that have directly affected them - there is an acceptance that God has punished His Chosen People for a good reason.

Christianity and Islam are not exactly 'here and now' religions. Because both rely heavily on the pleasures of paradise after death, they are extremely attractive religions to the multitudes of poor and afflicted people whose lives on Earth are hellish.

Simply put, whereas a wayward Jew may be chastised by a threat that 'God will strike you, make your business go bankrupt or deprive you of children', a wayward Christian or Moslem is more likely to be chastised by a threat that 'God will send you to Hell when you die'. Also, whereas a Christian or Moslem visiting an African refugee camp is likely to hand out bibles or religious tracts, a Jew is more likely to hand out contraceptives (to prevent more Africans from being born into misery.)

It can be surmised by this that those in control of both the Christian and Moslem religions - who have traditionally lived in luxury in Rome or Mecca - have a vested interest in both maintaining the hellish lives of their flocks on Earth and creating more hell on Earth in order to 'save' the new generation of converts. Hence, the Dark Ages, marked by deliberate withholding of knowledge from ordinary people by religious leaders; promotion of endless wars creating endless misery; the practice of tithing of earnings by which poor families were further impoverished; and strict religious laws promoting the creation of far more children than any poor family can sustain.

Being popular religions, therefore, does not necessarily make Christianity and Islam better or more truer than Judaism or any other religion.

When the popularity of any religion in the world - assessed by census statistics - can be directly correlated with the incidence of poverty and affliction, it is more an indictment against that religion than an accolade.

was race or religion the unique feature of western civilization?

At no other time in history - other than in the 7th century when Rome chose it as the bastion of Christianity in the face of rising Islam - has Ireland played any major role in shaping the political, economic or cultural evolution of the western world. Indeed, the universal state of western civilization was represented by the Hapsburg Monarchy 1526-1918, not the Celtic kings.

And, except for continuing to lead the Catholic Church, the political power of the Pope in Rome has diminished considerably in modern times.

If Christianity - in particular Catholicism - were the unique feature of Western civilization at its inception in 675 in Ireland, then it did not remain so forever.

However, Ireland cannot be discounted for another major unique feature of Western civilization at its inception in 675 that has remained strong - it's white Celtic ethnic identity.

Because of the abominable conditions of overpopulation and poverty in Ireland, the Irish provided by far the most immigrants to the new worlds in centuries to follow. In that respect, the Irish Celts most certainly played the most important part in shaping the ethnic identity of the evolving western civilization.

In that respect, Ireland in 675 was indeed the 'cradle' of western civilization. If historians believe that a unique ethnicity founded western civilization, then it was a white Irish Celtic ethnicity - not the Mediterranean ethnicity of the Romans, French and Spanish, nor the polyglot ethnicity of the various other northern tribes in the western world at the time.

In fact, because three separate and distinctive Christian civilizations evolved in Turkey, Russia and Europe - respectively represented by the Ottoman Empire, the Muscovite Empire and the Hapsburg Monarchy - indicates that Christianity was not a unique feature of western civilization.

Of race and religion, then, race in the form of white Celtic ethnicity, was the unique feature of Western civilization.